Prologue

A reluctant nationalist

The culmination of ramblings and agitations of nineteenth century troublemaking nationalists replete with the trappings of quasi-intellectual finery came in 1919 in Paris concluding the close of the First World War. The Germans surrendered to the Americans hoping to preserve their empire. They miscalculated badly as the American President Woodrow Wilson was an idiot.

You can trace every problem of the past one hundred years to this overeducated ninny from Princeton. Like a master of ceremonies to surreal variety show, note that everyone of the twentieth centuries’ great villains – Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milosevic to name a few all owe their gravitas to the miscalculations of the former Governor of New Jersey.

What would kind of peace would Teddy Roosevelt offer up?

While Teddy Roosevelt led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, Woodrow was grading papers, but I guess it is the same type of service, right?

We live in a world of wild eyed Jacobins, rebellious for rebellion’s sake; steal with avarice, murder with impunity and rape without shame waving the bloody shirt of nationalism.

Most of our world problems come from countries that didn’t exist a hundred years ago. The more advanced peoples ruled over the less advanced. A Jew could be a French citizen so long as he supported the Revolution. A Slavonic Christian belonged to the Ottoman Sultan. A Punjabi barrister could be a British subject. What was a Slovak, a Kurd, or an Israeli, if you were a Catholic with a Polish mother and a Czech father who made his living in the German Empire? Yankee go home! Okay where?

These were my sentiments when I entered college and experienced the Clintonian forays into multiculturalism. That we Americans did not consist of a melting pot of the finest spices from all over the world but instead a confederation of racial tribes competing for federal apportionment suckling taxpaying largesse. I was a bit disgusted by this behavior. I grew up alienated from my heritage save the links to my family. Because the world in which I grew up in had been so different from the world I navigated in the public schools of sunny Arizona that I formed to separate worlds and two separate identities as I could not easily translate one to the other. My ancestry, though clues to my identity formed a private part of me – not a public badge that entitled me to give-a-ways.

Having been influenced by the ideas of author, Leon Uris, I too venture away from the world I know and love – my country to that old country, the mother country, my own personal Israel.